ENGLEWOOD, Colo.—Mike McCoy's time might be now and the Broncos know it.

Denver's offensive coordinator popped on coaching search lists last year because he created a functional offense with Tim Tebow, a quarterback so scattershot that he had the worst completion percentage for anyone with at least 250 passes in 11 years. Now his success with Peyton Manning makes the 40-year-old McCoy one of the league’s hotter commodities among assistant coaches. If the Broncos seal a first-round bye next Sunday with a win over the 2-13 Chiefs, McCoy is likely to spend that weekend with briefcase in hand, interviewing for his chance to run a show.

Mike McCoy has guided Tim Tebow to the playoffs and Peyton Manning to a possible MVP, making the Broncos' offensive coordinator a hot head-coaching candidate. (AP Photo)

Some coaches only get one good chance to be a hot candidate, which causes many to jump before they're ready. Don't count on McCoy being that hasty to jump on the first train out of town.

“I love my job here. I work for the best organization in the NFL,” McCoy said. “My wife and I and the kids, we absolutely love Denver.”

It’s not that McCoy doesn’t want to become a head coach. It’s that he only wants the right situation. He demonstrated that discerning taste last January, when three teams approached him, but only the Miami Dolphins got to interview him.

“We were told a lot of things last year,” McCoy said. “You never know.”

What the Broncos know is they have a gem in their midst.

"Everybody loves continuity, and he’s done an amazing job," said wide receiver Eric Decker, “I’ve been here for three years and I’ve got all the respect for him. I definitely love working for him and would love him to stay."

Those sentiments are echoed around the Broncos' locker room for an assistant coach who keeps his emotions in check, doesn't use public statements to cut down his players and displays a placid, but palpable, authority over the offense, which John Fox has entrusted to him.

"I think Mike has done an outstanding job," Fox said. "He did an outstanding job a year ago. He's done the same thing again this year. You like to see people get opportunities and have those options. I'm sure it will be no different this year."

Last January, the Dolphins, Raiders and Jaguars approached McCoy for potential interviews. With the Jaguars, the timing wasn’t right; they wanted to move quickly and McCoy was in the midst of playoff preparation. Oakland was zeroing in on Dennis Allen, then the Broncos’ defensive coordinator. That left the Dolphins, who invited him back for a second interview before choosing Packers offensive coordinator Joe Philbin.

Philbin shares some key characteristics with McCoy: he's a teacher by nature; he's patient; he prefers an even-keeled demeanor to theatrical histrionics. The primary difference between the two was experience; Philbin, 51 years of age, had his first full-time coaching job in 1986, when McCoy had just started high school.

McCoy fell short, but was close enough to entertain the possibility and the changes it would entail.

"When we got back the first night, my wife and I talked about it and we said, ‘The great thing about it is, if we don't get the job, we've got the greatest job with the Denver Broncos,'" he recalled this offseason. "So, we couldn’t lose in the situation. Of course I wanted to be a head coach, but that will come over time."

For a coach who’s been in the league 13 seasons, McCoy has endured remarkable stability. He’s worked for just two franchises, joining the Broncos in 2009 after nine seasons with Carolina. More impressively, he’s never been fired, even though coaches around have him have fallen. His first boss, George Seifert, was sacked in Carolina after a franchise-worst 1-15 season in 2001. The first offensive coordinator he worked under during Fox's Panthers stewardship, Dan Henning, was let go after the 2006 season. And the man who brought him to Denver in 2009, Josh McDaniels, was fired in December 2010 after losing 17 of his last 22 games.

But the dumping of McDaniels provided McCoy the chance he'd craved since entering the league: his first opportunity to call plays full time. Until then, the offensive coordinator title McCoy held was somewhat ceremonial; McDaniels made all in-game decisions, while McCoy handled teaching in the areas of the practice field that McDaniels didn't patrol. The experience was crucial in allowing him to keep the position when the Broncos hired Fox in January 2011.

"I probably knew him better than this building (Broncos headquarters) knew him because I had him for all those years in Carolina," Fox said.

What he knew was that McCoy was bright, steady and above all, flexible.

"We’re firm believers here that you have to adjust to who you have," McCoy said.

Without that, he wouldn't have been equipped to junk an offense that was a near-carbon copy of the Patriots' scheme midway through the 2011 season in favor of an attack that emphasized the zone-read option. It was the most run-heavy in the league and gave Tim Tebow his first—and, in retrospect, best and perhaps only—chance to succeed.

"(McCoy's) definitely a very smart and hardworking guy to be able to go from kind of a spread offense, throwing the ball around, doing some zone running to the read option, now back to Peyton with the offense we’ve got," Decker said.

If McCoy could turn Tebow into a passable NFL quarterback, what could he do working with an elite one? The results have been obvious; Manning is enjoying his best season since 2004, doing so in an offense that melds elements of the power running McCoy learned in Carolina with some nomenclature of the Patriots-based system in which he worked under McDaniels and for two seasons in Carolina under then-offensive coordinator Jeff Davidson, a former New England assistant.

Sure, Manning makes an offensive coordinator look good. But Manning's touchdown-pass total of 34 is his highest in eight years, his completion percentage is the second-best of his career and his quarterback rating of 103.7 is on track to be his finest in seven years—even though Manning asserted Sunday that he isn’t the quarterback he was in his prime.

“Certain things are harder for me than they used to be. You have to give more effort on certain things, and that’s just the way it is for me,” Manning said. “It’s different for me. It’s a different kind of body that I’m playing in. It’s a different type of quarterback play for me.”

Yet with those changes and a new set of teammates with whom Manning had to develop timing, he’s had a vintage, MVP-caliber season, a performance McCoy helped make possible.

So maybe McCoy’s 2013 season will be defined by extracting every possible drop of success out of another quarterback, just like he did the wildly disparate Tebow and Manning. Or maybe he’ll look around, decide the grass isn’t greener and stay put, figuring that another year with a future Hall of Famer and a team that oozes world-title potential looks better on his résumé.

“We'll see what happens,” McCoy said. “If it's meant to be, it's meant to be. If not, hey, we can stay here for a long time.”